Cross-cultural approaches to plumbing
Forget chefs étoilés, luxury boutiques and exclusive venues. The real premium experience in Paris is the plumbing company down the street and when you are not a VIP well... good luck to you and woe betide you if you need them urgently.
First of all you need to book a consultation for which you have to pay an hourly fee. Once that’s done they study your issue and send you a proposal. Except that they are so successful and so popular that you have to chase them in order for them to send you their bill and proposal. If you don’t pay for the consultation, they don’t really care. They won’t chase you. They don’t need your money. They are cool like that.
Once you have your proposal you have to usually wait 2 to 3 weeks for them to have an availability. If you have an emergency they actually ask you to resort to another plumbing company and even volunteer to give you contacts. But of course they have been in your street for 5 generations and know every appartement by heart and only they will do. Plumbing is a very underrated career path. They know the ins and outs of your old Haussmanien building and it’s ancient labyrinth of valiently resistent pipes. So, I had no choice but to try my luck with them.
The reason why I needed a plumber is that deep behind beautiful my Haussmanien walls lie a bunch of pipes, tangled like a plate of spaghetti. One of them is leaking and I identified that thanks to my acute sense of smell (my underrated talent sometimes proves useful).
The superstar plumber identified the leak by inserting a long flexible camera into the wall. He advised us to get a contractor to open the access to the pipes so that we can save on their hefty hourly rates.
I called our trusted Egyptian contractors and to my surprise they marched in today carrying three huge saws and directly stared sawing the column in which the pipe was situated ignoring me as I frantically tried to get them to communicate with me on their action plan. Indeed, when you have barely woken up and are clinging to your coffee cup for dear life, seeing three men running around your appartment with saws is a notable occurence.
Finally the head contractor decided that it was his duty to find the hole and inspect it himself «because the French plumber might be lying to you and he will mess up all my hard work and I don’t need a bloody fancy camera to do my job. I’ve been doing this since I was 13 and we didn’t have any equipement let alone cameras and I have built houses with my own bare hands, so this for me is nothing».
He spends the next 20 minutes yelling at his assistant before finally finding the leak himself and telling me that he has no idea how to fix it and that hopefully the French plumber won’t rip me off.
